On April 29, the New York label Broken Limbs will release a 7″ vinyl split by two stunningly powerful bands — Fister from St. Louis, Missouri, and California’s TEETH — and at the bottom of this post you’ll have a chance to stream all of it.
I wouldn’t blame you if you just skip to the end and start listening, but in case you want some idea about what you’re in for, continue reading. Continue reading »
We have for you today a full stream of the self-titled debut album by the German band Trautonist. When I heard the first single from the album back in January — “Distance” — I described it then as flowing like a slow, sinuous stream under cloudy skies, with you the listener floating along with it, a soft breeze on your neck, falling into a meditative trance but still mindful of a knife edge that lingers under your throat.
I was captivated by the song’s drifting atmosphere of regret and longing, and enjoyed the vocal tandem of the band’s two members (Dennis and Katharina), one harsh and shrieking, the other ghostly and pure.
But it turns out that “Distance” (relatively speaking) is the softest and most self-reflective track on an album that, as a whole, is both emotionally intense and more extreme than I might have guessed. On the other hand, the song also turned out to be a reliable sign of the band’s ability to craft bereft but moving melodies. Continue reading »
Wasteland is the name of the debut EP by New York’s False Gods, and it’s a well-chosen title because this massively heavy, staggeringly bleak, and frequently hallucinatory EP seems like a musical survey of life’s wreckage.
The five songs on the EP aren’t all in the same vein musically. You may think you know where they’re going after the first very catchy song (or even two), but as you move ahead you eventually realize you’re on your way into a descent, and there’s a soul-destroying pit of despair at the end of the fall. Continue reading »
(Comrade Aleks has interviewed Finland’s Cardinals Folly for us before (here), and now he provides some history of the band’s music along with comments about their forthcoming new album.)
This blasphemous cult was started in Helsinki in around 2004 under name The Coven. That title fits the band’s music, but there were just too many bands with the same name, so The Coven was dissolved and renamed Cardinals Folly after a place in a Dennis Wheatley black magic novel.
The head of this sect is Mikko Kääriäinen and he’s the only constant member of Cardinals Folly, as other musicians have come and gone after some number of occult sessions. Probably only drummer Sebastian Lindberg demonstrated perseverance as he accompanied Mikko from the first EP Heretic’s Hangover (2008) ’til the second full-length Our Cult Continues! (2014), but even he left the band a year later after the album was released… or probably Mikko just sacrificed him in a forest — who knows? Continue reading »
(Wil Cifer reviews the new album by Oakland-based Alaric.)
In my assessment of what makes a band heavy, darkness is an integral component of the equation. Dialing in the gain and tuning lower are easy first steps toward this woeful abyss, but it really takes the ability to convey life experience stained by addiction, mental illness, and deep loss to capture convincing sonic shades.
This band from Oakland is more than convincing when it comes to diving into the shadows. They caught my ear when the whole hipster death rock revival came into my consciousness, though these guys are much rougher around their serrated edges than other bands that rode in on that wagon. Now five years later they have made a very welcome return with End of Mirrors thanks to Neurot Recordings.
All the things that have worked for these guys in the past are in place as they plow into the post-apocalyptic wasteland their music conjures. Their bassist provides varied levels of gloom-ridden melodies that are trod upon by the guitarist, a member of the sludge band Noothgrush. Some of the hypnotizing grooves here take multiple listens to fully sink in. Continue reading »
(New Zealand music writer and broadcaster Craig Hayes rejoins us with this review of the new album II by Sinistrous Diabolus, which was self-released on March 31, 2016, and is available on Bandcamp.)
Many of metal’s most interesting bands are intensely dramatic without ever indulging in any overt theatrics. Often those bands are fronted by singular musicians whose creations reflect the pitch-black depths of their own trials and tribulations. Those musicians aren’t playing ‘make believe’, and their music frequently burrows into the darkest recesses of our own minds.
Cult New Zealand death/doom band Sinistrous Diabolus definitely fits into that category. And the band’s new full-length, II, is a monstrous, spine-chilling album that delivers an altogether soul-crushing experience. Fans of Australian death/doom band Inverloch’s excellent Distance | Collapsed album from earlier this year will find comparable levels of heaviness awaiting on Sinistrous Diabolus’ II. But if the name Sinistrous Diabolus doesn’t leap to mind when you’re contemplating the gloomiest metal around, that’s perfectly understandable.
Sinistrous Diabolus is a markedly underground entity from the far-flung reaches, and has been on hiatus a number of times since forming in the early ’90s. The band isn’t actually operating right now, even though there’s a new album out. But even if you’ve never heard of Sinistrous Diabolus before, you might well have heard the band’s influence echoing in Australiasian extreme metal. Continue reading »
(In this post we bring you the first of what we hope will be many recommendations of music at NCS by Neill Jameson (Krieg).)
Over the weekend I saw Nails at Choosing Death in Philadelphia. Much like the previous times I’ve seen them it was the audial equivalent of a bulldozer; aggressive, violent, and most importantly, ugly. It made me remember that their Unsilent Death record was a very important moment in my life, creating and feeding my interest in hardcore as a genre beyond either what seemed to me to be loaded with guys lifting weights and shopping for baseball hats on one side of the fence and old bands like Black Flag and Poison Idea who made some of my favorite punk records on the other. I learned that there was hardcore out there that was negative, dark, and expressed something beyond what seemed like a frat house aesthetic.
In the few years since then I’ve been digging into the genre and finding a lot of really, to me, interesting records that fed the need for the dark and heavy sounds of metal while expressing the sort of negative emotions that are fairly constant in my life. Labels like A389, Organized Crime, Melotov, and Magic Bullet are just some that work within this area and are good spots to check out if you have further interest.
I approached NCS with the idea to occasionally pop in and write about music that’s important to me that other folks into metal might not be familiar with but could appreciate. I figured dark hardcore would be a good place to start. So without giving you more back story you don’t care about, here’s a few bands & records to check out. Continue reading »
I’m sure no one’s counting (including me), but I don’t manage to write many stand-alone album reviews in a given year. In the time I have available to devote to this site, I spend most of it doing other things. I listen to many forthcoming albums that I like a great deal, and yet never manage to say anything about (many more I never manage to hear at all). And once an album is released, if I haven’t already written about it, I tend to ruefully shake my head at myself and move on down the road to new things looming on the horizon ahead.
This is a very rare occasion when I’m not doing that. Grey Heaven Fall’s Black Wisdom was released last October by the small Russian label Aesthetics of Devastation. I received an advance digital copy, and then in December the label sent me a CD. I thought the album was an amazing accomplishment, one of the best I heard in 2015, yet I still didn’t manage to write about it. And that would have been that, except this label is persistent, and they contacted me again recently. Sometimes that kind of persistence can be aggravating. In this case, it made me think again about what a tremendously creative and powerful album Black Wisdom is, and I convinced myself that even now, almost six months after the release, I owed it to the band to say so.
Trying to describe the multifaceted music or explain its unusual appeal is difficult, especially for someone like me who’s still a rank amateur when it comes to writing about music. But I’m going to try, comforted by the knowledge that at the end of this effort I can embed a full stream of the music and let it speak for itself. Continue reading »
(Our contributor from Norway, Gorger, returns with the 11th edition of his series recommending releases that we’ve managed to overlook. To find more of his discoveries, visit Gorger’s Metal.)
Sometimes, my mouth has diarrhea. Other times, I’ve got less crap to share. Oh, wait, I’ve got one thing. One of these scrawlings is longer than the others, and so I find three to be an adequate number of presentations this time. I hope it’s not too long, and that you will at least take the time to listen to the music. And so, without further ado, I present three albums that I for one feel deserve your attention. Continue reading »
(DGR delivers a two-fer… reviewing the new albums by California’s The Zenith Passage and Omophagia from Zurich.)
If you’re a fan of the modern tech-death scene — the one in which tech-death has evolved into its own shorthand moniker to represent an entire genre as opposed to just a way to describe complicated death metal — then last week should have proved to be pretty big for you, as Unique Leader had two releases hitting right in the same window.
The label, which has specialized in a brand of tech-death that is equal parts technical and groove-focused, has spread out quite a bit in the past few years and has become increasingly prolific, to the point where they’ve actually developed something of their own sound. You could say, “Unique Leader tech-death” to some people, and they would have a pretty good starting point as to whatever bands you’d be describing at that moment. While the label has always delved heavily into the California scene (at one point seeming like they were sweeping through the Bay-Area-to-Sacramento run especially), recent years have also seen the label adding quite a few international acts to the mix — which brings us to this point.
Last week brought two fairly big Unique Leader releases, one of which is the first full-length release for So-Cal-based The Zenith Passage and the other the second album (after a five-year wait) for Swiss death metal proprietors Omophagia. As such, I felt it might be interesting to slam the two albums into one big review package, because both of them by their nature feel like two takes on the same subject — two differing styles of death metal but with one very solid throughline between them. Continue reading »